Charles Bukowski On Writing

I try to do all of my writing during the week. Songs I’ll write anytime. Poems anytime. But everything else gets pushed away at least once a week. It seems I’m always editing something or getting a blog post together by Sunday evening, but mostly, during the weekends, words are for reading.

Nowadays that means reading the articles I’ve streamlined into my Flipboard feed. I’ve got a pretty big ass phone at this point and it doubles as a very readable, little tablet.

This weekend I came across some news that a new Charles Bukowski book was going to be released. On Writing illuminates the author’s wordcraft with the help of a hitherto undiscovered cache of Buk’s letters.

“If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him …There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.” — Bukowski

Here’s some more advice from the man himself that I found in The Telegraph…

Yes to D.H. Lawrence, No to William Falkner

“DH Lawrence was solid all the way through but Henry Miller was more modern, less artsy, until he got into his Star-Trek babbling . . . with William Faulkner, the public has swallowed him with one big gulp – but a lot of Faulkner’s pure sh-t, but it’s clever sh-t, cleverly dressed.”

On Poets, Young and Old

“Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master . . . it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem, that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.”

Writing is a Hustle

“Don’t get me wrong. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.”

Sucky Writers

And some writers are just no good
“When I worked on a magazine I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‘i’s’ small.”

I’m celebrating this good news watching Taylor Hackford’s eponymous doc about the author from 1973…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more book posts.

Joe Nolan was born under a bad sign on June 13th in Detroit, Michigan in the last Metal Year of the Dog. Polymath, provocateur, inter-media artist, his tell-tale signs have turned up in music, visual art, journalism, poetry, fiction, video and film. A double Gemini, his interests range from the pharmacology of phenomenology to fly fishing; from mysticism to mixed martial arts; from chaos science to chaos magick. Joe Nolan's Insomnia blog republishes to some of the most read counter-culture sites on the web and the Coincidence Control Network podcast which he hosts has been downloaded more than half-a-million times.He is recording his fourth CD in Nashville, Tennessee where he lives to the east of the Cumberland river on a little wooded lot dubbed Bohemian Walnut Grove.